May 1917

James Joyce, A New Irish Novelist

James Joyce has come to town, and he has come to stay. A new star has appeared in the firmament of Irish letters, a star of the first magnitude. The question that one is now asked is not have you seen a portrait, but “Have you read ‘The Portrait’?” All of a sudden everyone is reading and talking about “The Portrait.” Everywhere one hears it. In a recent review of the book an acute and subtle critic said that the question “Who is James Joyce?” is doubtless a question easier to answer in Dublin than in New York. I will give the answer. James Joyce is a Dubliner of about thirty-six. He was educated at the well-known Jesuit college, Clongowes, near Dublin. After leaving Clongowes, he attended University College, Dublin, for some years. The critic that I have referred to wrote that the had no news as to the reception of Joyce’s book in Dublin, but added that “it must have aroused hostility.” The fact is that it has not yet reached Dublin at all. When it does, a few Irish puritans and patriots may get hot under the collar, and it will be very amusing, as it was in the case of Synge. A pious Catholic here or there may call Joyce an Irish decadent. Good old phrase! It saves so much thought. Before the war he would have been called by the same sort of “patriot” a French decadent. But the war has killed that overworked phrase, and we are hearing no more, as we did in the case of Synge, of French decadence. The miracle of France’s great gesture in arms has put an end to that cheap and ignorant cry.

James Joyce is the author of three books: (1) A book of poems called “Chamber Music” (Elkin Mathews, London, 1907)—a little volume of very perfect verse; (2) “Dubliners,” containing fifteen stories (Grant Richards, London, 1914); (3) and his last book, “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man,” just published (Huebsch, New York, 1916).

“Dubliners” was refused by a well-known Dublin publishing house because, it has been stated, pressure was brought to bear from high quarters against it. It also has just been published here by Mr. Huebsch. “Dubliners” is one of the most sincere and realistic books ever written. Its great sincerity is one of its chief attractions. The book does not belong to the flashy school of literature. It is the work of a writer who was moved by what he felt and saw, but apparently remained as cold as stone. It is the reader who catches the infection. I am tempted to say is it the most powerful book of short stories in English published in the last ten years.

‘A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man” is dated at the end: “Dublin 1904—Trieste 1914.” Those two dates, to one who knows, tell the story: Ten years of teaching in Trieste, so as to be able to write as he liked, so as to be independent, without having to listen to editors; ousted by the war, sick, subject to eye-rheumatism or something or other that makes him temporarily blind, or at least too blind to keep most jobs; given a few months ago a grant of one hundred pounds from the British government; his book refused by a half a dozen nincompoop London publishers who were afraid to touch it; its appearance in installments in that too-little known monthly review, “The Egoist,” published in London; and now its publication in book form in New York. No change from the text as it appeared in the “The Egoist” is made in the story in book form. But the book has the addition of a vivid scene; as that the book is the real article. Ten or twenty years hence, collectors will buy “The Egoist” because it contains this great novel by James Joyce and Wyndham Lewis’ novel “Tarr,” and poems and translations by Ezra Pound and others; just as collectors to-day buy “Once a Week” because it contains things by George Meredith, Swinburne, Rossetti, William Morris and Whistler published in it in the sixties. It is due to the enterprise and courage of an American publisher that Joyce’s book has first seen the light of day. The publisher is receiving his reward. The book places James Joyce in the same rank with James Stephens and John M. Synge.

Partial blindness! No wonder the book is a distillation of bitter-sweet. It is not “unpleasant.” No one could recall the Christmas dinner and the row over Parnell, the wonderful sermon, the confession, and the other episodes in the book, and complain that it lacked special inventiveness. The sermon itself is epical. There is no record of any “movement” or “revival” in it, for Joyce is too good an artist to mix propaganda with his art. He knows the vital distinction that poetry is never propaganda.

I received a letter from Joyce in October, 1916, from Zurich, Switzerland, telling me that he had received just a few days before a letter from the British Treasury informing him that on the recommendation of the Prime Minister a royal bounty of one hundred pounds had been granted to him. Joyce added: “I can now see my way ahead for a certain time and I hope that in the meantime I shall have no more trouble with my book.”

This was a grant of one lump sum, not “a hardy annual” pension. I hope that the present regime in England will be as discerning and as generous and will renew the grant. But now that two of his books are out in this country, the start has been made.

One often hears in these days of war the remark that very little good literature is written or published. When I hear that, I often refer to the modern Irish writers and say that anything by William Butler Years, Lady Gregory, George Russel (A.E.), James Stephens, Padraic Colum, and now I shall add James Joyce, is literature and is always worth reading. Joyce’s last book stands out above anything that has been published in this country or in Great Britain in the last two years. It will naturally be compared with the recollections of that other distinguished Irish poet and dramatist, William Butler Yeats, whose “Reveries Over Childhood and Youth” was published about a year ago. Yeats’ book is like a series of tapestries depicting his youth and childhood in Sligo and in the art and literary world of London. Joyce’s book is like a series of etchings. In some cases the acid has bit deep into the plate. To read Yeats’ book might be compared to going into a finely proportioned room hung with noble paintings by Puvis de Chavannes. To read Joyce is like being in a room decorated with paintings by Daumier or Toullouse-Lautrec. “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man” is a great work of art. It will live. There is nothing abstract about Joyce. His style is vital and has the radium that makes art live. He writes with the frankness and freedom that is not uncommon in Ireland. That Irish frankness surprised and shocked a few in Synge’s plays, notably in the “Playboy of the Western World.” But Synge’s writings have now taken their place as classics. If James Joyce can keep up the pace that this book sets, he is assumed of an equally high place. Synge is perhaps the more Irish of the two; more Irish in the richness of his idiom and the color of his thought and the quality of his style, although the culture of both is European. Joyce has not so deep a talent. He has written a play which may be as great a success as the “The Portrait” and “Dubliners,” and one can never tell how far a first-rate man will go. I do not say that with two books of prose and a small volume of verse to his credit he is a great writer. But I do say that this last book is a great work of art. Conrad, a friend of mine, is a great creative artist. I do not compare him, a veteran writer, with Joyce, a young one. But Joyce’s mind interests me greatly. I like his way of writing tremendously. After all, there is plenty of room for the work of artists like Joseph Conrad and George Moore, as well as for the work of James Joyce, just as in a live gallery there should be room for paintings by Manet and Cezanne and Picasso.

Ezra Pound in “The Drama” for February of 1916 had an article on “James Joyce and the Modern Stage.” As a pure matter of literary history that article by a great poet and critic, our only real knight-errant of letters, will be remembered. I must quote one paragraph of what Mr. Pound there said:

“Mr. Joyce is undoubtedly one of our best contemporary authors. He has written a novel, and I am quite ready to stake anything I had in this world that that novel is permanent. It is permanent. It is permanent as are the works of Stendhal and Flaubert. Two silly publishers have just refused it in favor of froth, another declines to look at it because ‘he will not deal through an agent’—yet Mr. Joyce lives on the continent and can scarcely be expected to look after his affairs in England save through a deputy. And Mr. Joyce is the best prose writer of my generation, in English. So far as I know, there is no one better in either Paris or Russia. In English we have Hardy and Henry James and, chronologically, we have Mr. James Joyce. The intervening novelists print books, it is true, but for me or for any man of my erudition, for any man living at my intensity, these books are things of no substance.”

“A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man” was refused by publishers in London ostensibly because of the frankness with which certain episodes in life of a young man were treated. It is perhaps not a book for all young women: pas pour la jeune fille. And yet no young man or young woman of the right fibre would be harmed by it. Compared to such a soft and false and dangerous book as “Ann Veronica,” by H.G. Wells, for example, not to speak of similar American trash that reeks and smells of sex, Joyce’s book is bracing and hard and clean. Neither is it a book for suffragettes, for Joyce never argues. He does not try to convince. He has no thesis. His book is just life. It is good, clean writing, even if some of his phrases are as startling as many that could be culled from the bible. His is a new style. There is no ornament, no rhetoric, nothing declamatory, no compromise, complete realism, and great sincerity. This way of writing is not easy. The book was not written on a typewriter, one may be sure; nor was it dictated to a stenographer between motor trips or while the author strolled about his room smoking a cigarette or puffing at his pipe.

He has the sincerity of genius. Let a man be ever so frank and plain-spoken, as Joyce is, if he is sincere, he is not vulgar or “unpleasant.” In “The Portrait” we have a man at grips with himself and his love of life. The book must not be read line by line as a pedant would read it, or as a conventional reviewer would read it, but as a whole, and then one will realize what a fine, hard, great piece of work it is.

If the book had been translated from the Russian, it would have instantly been hailed as a masterpiece. But it is a finer work of art than any Russian novel written in the last ten years that has been translated into English. The conversations of those young men will be most intelligible to Irish Catholics. Irish Ireland is in some respects a mediaeval country, and the talks of those young students, saturated with their religion in spite of their free-thinking, with the boy-Latin that they talk, is mediaeval and yet quite modern.

When “Dubliners” was published three years ago I handed a copy of it to an Irish friend of mine, an artist and a man of letters, and said to him that here was a new Irish writer that had the real stuff in him. My friend read the book and returning it to me said: “Good God, Quinn, that is a gray book! One always knew that there were such places in Dublin, but one never wanted to go near or to hear of them. But the man can write.”

I have compared William Butler Yeats’ “Reveries Over Childhood and Youth” with Joyce’s “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.” Both Yeats and Joyce are poets. Yeats in his Reveries is a poet looking back to his youth fondly, and seeing things through the mists of tenderness. Joyce writes his book about his youth in his youth. It has the bite and the harshness of strong youth, but what art! Yeats is a great poet at fifty writing of his youth. Joyce, the most gifted of all the young Irish writers, does the story of his youth at twenty-five. There we have the difference. The older poet has acquired the sense of life. The younger struggles with the stuff of life. Both are frank and very sincere. Some may think Joyce is bitter. But he is not. He is true to life. In one of his lyrics he speaks of

“A sage that is but kith and kin

With the comedian Capuchin.”

But perhaps the truer key is found in Joyce’s words toward the end of his book: “and I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can and as wholly as I can, using for my defense the only arms I allow myself to use, silence, exile and cunning.”

Yeats read no bitterness into his “Reveries” for he wrote of his youth as he had lived it. Bitterness or regret may be found in a poem on his forbears that he wrote about the time that he was writing his “Reveries”:

“Pardon that for a barren passion’s sake,

Although I have come close on forty-nine,

I have no child, I have nothing but a book,

Nothing but that to prove your blood and mine.”

Folk-lore is always in the making in Dublin. And Dublin has its folk-lore about James Joyce and his father. Here is one bit of Dublin folk-lore about the elder Joyce: He was living with a very pious Catholic friend. They were out going to mass one Sunday morning. It started to rain. The elder Joyce cursed. His pious friend remonstrated and said: “Don’t curse, James, for you know our divine Lord has the power to flood the world again, and therefore we should be thankful if it only rains.” “He could indeed flood the world again,” replied the elder Joyce,—“if he was an auld fool.”

One of the legends of the younger Joyce is that some ten years ago he parted from William Butler Yeats after a long talk on letters and art with the remark: “I am sorry that I met you too late in life to influence you.” Another legend is that Yeats introduced Joyce to Arthur Symons at about the same time and that Symons talked to Balzac. Joyce said: “Balzac! Who reads Balzac to-day?” While Joyce might have pretended to scorn Balzac then, it is quite evident that he has read Balzac many times. An Irish friend of mine says that the Irish are a harsh people like the Spaniards and do not care whether they do or do not offend and bewilder other people. Joyce is a master of the pungent phrase. It is part of his harshness. There is poetry in his book, plenty of it, a stormy sort of poetry, cloudy and wild, like the Irish skies in the winter months. He is a great student. That often makes all the difference between the major and the minor writer. He is a thinker, a man looking for principles; his purpose is other than mere mischief. And thank God he is not a propagandist. His book is a picture of Dublin. Dublin has something of the charm of Athens. Belfast has no charm. For all its vitality, it is sterilized in business, sterilized so far as the joy and variety of life go. Dublin is rediscovered.

I have said that Joyce’s first book was a little volume of very perfect verse. Could anything surpass the beauty and perfection of this, which might be one of Douglas Hyde’s Love Songs of Connacht:

“O sweetheart, hear you

Your Lover’s tale;

A man shall have sorrow

When friends him fail.
For he shall know then

Friends be untrue,

And a little ashes

Their words come to.
But one unto him

Will softly move

And softly woo him

In ways of love.
His hand is under

Her smooth round breast;

So he who has sorrow

Shall have rest.”

While Dublin folk-lore may give Joyce as saying to Yeats that they met too late for Joyce to influence Yeats, Joyce’s poems show that he has been influenced by Yeats. But what young Irish writer has not been influenced or helped by him, the most helpful, the most disinterested, the most fastidious critic and appreciator of contemporary literature that we have?